In the 23 years since Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, Anita Hill has moved forward with her life and is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. With a documentary about the events surrounding Hill's testimony at Thomas' confirmation hearings coming to theaters on March 21, Iet's take a look back at the case that brought sexual harassment out of the shadows.

Wait, who was she? More than 20 years ago, during the controversial nomination process for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, his former employee Anita Hill alleged a series of creepy advances from Thomas, including repeated requests for dates as well as graphic discussions of sex and pornography while the two were working at the Department of Education and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "On several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess," she testified. This played out in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, putting sexual harassment on a national stage (and on live TV) for the first time. This was a big deal. Hill saw her name and reputation dragged through the mud. Dominating the closing of the hearings was testimony from Texas businessman John N. Doggett III, who claimed Hill "fantasized" about him, and she was portrayed in conservative magazine American Spectator as "a little bit slutty."

Why'd she do it? Hill didn't come forward when the harassment happened (it started when she was 25!) because she knew "that telling at any point in my career could adversely affect my future career. And I did not want early on to burn all the bridges to the EEOC." (Pause and ponder. Get mad.) However, "when Senate staff asked me about these matters, I felt I had a duty to report."

They asked her what? What's really insane is that, looking at the testimony, you'll see respected senators like Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), interrogating Hill with questions about watching porn with Thomas and repeating Thomas' victim-blaming claim that this happened because "she was having a problem with being rejected by men she was attracted to." Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who is still in office, quizzed her about a porn star called Long Dong Silver (yuck) and accused Hill of seeking to advance her career—as talking about your boss's sexual advances tends to do—and working with "slick lawyers" to derail Thomas' nomination. After questioning her, Senator Spector also told reporters that "her credibility has been demolished."

So who came to her defense? During some of the most intense parts of the questioning, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked Specter to "let the witness speak in her own words, rather than having words put in her mouth." And while now Vice President Joe Biden (D-Del.) stepped in a few times during testimony in his role as chairman of the committee, he excluded other women who were set to testify against Thomas and his history of porn rentals. Biden later said that he acted in fairness to Thomas, which in retrospect he didn't deserve.

And how'd things pan out? When the committee ultimately sent no recommendations to a Senate that confirmed Thomas, Hill was lauded as a Glamour Woman of the Year (bringing the house down) just weeks after showing incredible poise during the grueling hearings. Many American women were dismayed by Thomas' appointment by a Senate that was 98 percent male (two women! two!), which led to a record number of women running for office and winning in 1992, including four new Senate seats and 24 new seats in the House! (Today there are 20 women holding seats in the Senate and 79 in the House, which is great, but we can do better, right?) And in the months and years afterward, tolerance of harassment in workplaces and on campuses shrank. Perhaps most significantly, the law changed. The month after the hearings, Congress passed a law that allowed sexual harassment victims to seek damage awards as well as back pay and reinstatement. It was signed by President George H. W. Bush, who had threatened to veto the act just a week before Hill testified. We have a lot more to do, but her legacy is worth cheering!

So, how would the woman herself want to be remembered? "I would like for us to imagine a world where the type of things that happened to me in the workplace and happen to so many women, even today, just don't happen. Instead of just saying, 'We know what to do,' when a problem confronts you, I would like us to think about...how about a world where it doesn't occur? Or when it does occur, it's an anomaly."